The pounding in my chest shoots through the top of my head, and I can feel the last bit of my sense leaving me. I don’t try to stop it. “So first you want to make fun of her hair and now you want to call her stupid?” I yell. “Oh, you gon’ learn today!” I march back to my seat, feeling Josh close behind me. When I get there, I squeeze the latches on the window and pull it down—cold air rushing in.
“You better stop playing, Rex! Give me back my phone!”
The cold air slapping me in the face gives me a rare glimpse of my anger. He’s like the homie from way-back-when who always has my back but chronically takes shit too far. But what am I supposed to do now? Back down from Josh? Nah. I grab his phone out of my pocket and hold it out of the window.
Everyone gasps. They’re all turned around, kneeling on their seats, staring at who they think they see. The asshole who acts like he’s too good to talk to anybody or hang with anybody. But it’s not even like that. Not even close.
“What the hell is going on back there?” Coach Bell finally gets up and yells.
Everyone sits down and faces forward in their seats.
It takes a lot for Coach to intervene on the bus. It’s the one place he completely removes himself. In the name of team bonding, the one place we get to make up our own rules, settle our own disputes.
“Rex is trying to throw my phone out of the window!” Josh answers, his five-year-old self back in full effect.
My five-year-old self wants to yell Snitch! But I don’t let him, not in front of Coach.
“Have you lost your mind?” Coach shouts down the aisle. “Give Josh his phone back.”
I pull my arm back in and toss the phone on the seat.
Josh grabs it and storms off.
“Rex, do I need to treat you like you’re my child and make you come sit up here with me?” Coach yells.
A simple rhetorical question, but it shoots deep, pricking the place I’m always pushing further down inside of me. It’s just that the words my child make me want to answer yes. I swear I’m so pathetic.
Where It Hurts
CARLI
When I get home, Cole’s in my room, sitting on my floor, still in his basketball warm-ups. He’s leaning against my bed, surrounded by a ton of old photos. Him and Daddy left the hospital right after the doctor left the room. Mom and I had to wait over an hour for my discharge papers. Looks like Cole’s been in here the whole time.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” he replies, but doesn’t look up from a photo he’s holding.
I head to my desk, where I remember tacking up the fact about ancient kisses, and look for it underneath a magazine clipping of a guitarfish. Not there. A charcoal sketch of Mom doing a backbend. Nope. A card of a young girl—eyes closed, hugging a book to her chest, with castles and dinosaurs and ships and cities and birds and trees in her curly afro. Not there, either.
“We have to choose,” Cole says.
I look over at him, and his eyes are red. He’s definitely been crying. But Cole cries at least once every couple of weeks, so I’m not too worried. Still, I stop my search after one last look under a crayon picture of a dark sea.
Then I tiptoe around all of Cole’s photos to the corner of the room where my bed is.
“We have to choose,” he repeats, and hands me a picture as I climb onto my bed.
I cross my legs and look down at the photo. I’ve never seen it before but remember Cole taking it. We were on the suspension bridge at the Bayou Bend Gardens a few years ago. While Mom, Daddy, and I waited in the middle of the bridge, Cole pushed the timer on the camera he’d set up and ran to get in place.
“Cute,” I say, looking at Daddy’s long arm draped around Mom and my head in the crux of Cole’s elbow, one leg up in the air like I’m about to fall over. Real smiles all around. I hand it back to him.
“Did you hear what I said? We have to choose.” He rips the photo in half—Mom and I on one side, him and Daddy on the other.
“Really, Cole?” I swear he can’t get any more dramatic. “You might as well give it to me now.” I scan my walls for the perfect place to fit the photo. There, I think, spotting the winged Greek goddess, Solange of Samothrace (I gave the Nike sculpture Solange’s head, and in my mind, she thanked me), right above my closet. The Bayou Bend Gardens has a cool collection of Greek goddess statues. The picture will feel at home there.
“Listen,” he says, and places the half of the picture with him and Daddy down beside his long, outstretched legs. “Dad’s moving out.”
The words come at me so straight it’s hard to register them. “Wait. What?”
Then he places the half with Mom and me on the other side of his legs. “They’re getting divorced.”
“Huh?” I wish he would slow down. He’s not making any sense.
Cole turns to face me. “Look, Mom and Dad are getting divorced, and we have to choose who we want to live with.”
My insides start plummeting. I feel like a baby fish who just got dropped out of a plane. A baby fish who’s flapping her fins in foreign air, trying to stay afloat, but keeps falling faster and faster. I read about it in National Geographic last night. About how some states repopulate their lakes by farming fish until they reach a certain age and then they release them into the wild by dropping them out of planes. After hitting the water, 90 percent of them survive. But I don’t know if I’ll survive. I can’t take this new reality Cole is dumping me into. “Will you wait a second!”
But Cole’s not listening. “If we choose Dad, we go to a new school. He’s not sure where yet, but somewhere closer to his job.” His voice is so even, so unemotional, like he’s not even talking about our life, our parents, our family. “We’ll get to see the parent we don’t choose every other weekend.”
“This is our life you’re talking about!” I yell. Something breaks behind my eyes, and tears rage down my face. Strange, warm tears. It’s been so long since I’ve felt them.
“I know,” he says, without trying to give me a hug. He’s still so calm. It’s like we’ve switched places and I’m the emotional wreck and he’s the chill one. What the hell’s going on? I am not supposed to be like this. He is not supposed to be like this. This is not supposed to be happening.
I scoot fast to the edge of the bed, preparing myself to run out of the room, to confront Mom and Daddy. Then I remember that Mom had to go to the office, and Daddy’s key chain with his bazillion keys wasn’t in the key bowl when I came in.
Cole picks up the pieces of the picture and turns to place them on my bed. “Here, you can have it.”
“Why? Why are they splitting up? Why like this?” This cannot be about the boutique. Daddy would never take his issues with Mom’s work this far. None of their arguments ever get this serious. Not to say that the residue of black-blue words hasn’t hung around for a few days here and there—house cold and quiet. But eventually someone cracks a joke or cuddles up or cranks up some nineties R&B or breaks out Monopoly or burps really loud, and things go back to normal. It’s like they’ve always known the limit of how far they could stress their love. But this is way over the limit.